In this issue:

Page 1:

• A Message from the Associate Department Head

Department History:

• Remembering Rudy Kalin

Psychology Update:

• Clinic Report

Psychology Profiles:

• Lola Cuddy
• Janet Menard
• Retirees
• Alumni

Graduate Studies:

• Focus on the Social-Personality program
• Welcome new students!

A Final Word on...

• The Association of Graduate Students in Psychology  

Researchers in the Social-Personality area continue to investigate core areas such as attitudes and persuasion, social cognition, intimate relationships, and cross-cultural differences, as well as applied areas such as eyewitness testimony, factors affecting test responses, and health promotion. Right now, all of the social-personality faculty are primary investigators on research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and many hold additional research grants as well. For a sample of the types of research we are conducting, here are the titles of the SSHRC grants currently held by our faculty members.

Dr. Lee Fabrigar: “Exploring the Consequences of Attitude Complexity”
Dr. Ron Holden: “Understanding Faking on Self-Report Personality Inventories: A Comparison of Theory-Based and Empirical Approaches to Detecting Faking”
Dr. Jill Jacobson: “Effects of Dysphoria and Social Anxiety on Eyewitness Memory”
Dr. Li-Jun Ji: “Why do North Americans and Chinese predict the future differently?”
Dr. Rod Lindsay: “Increasing Lineup Size to Reduce Wrongful Convictions”
Dr. Tara MacDonald: “Does the tendency to defer to a romantic partner vary as a function of attachment anxiety and threat of rejection?”

Our graduate students have enjoyed a number of recent successes.  Each year, Certificates of Academic Excellence are awarded by the Canadian Psychological Association for the three best Master’s theses and the three best Doctoral theses at Queen’s University.  These certificates have recently been awarded to a number of students from the Social-Personality area, including Eliane Boucher (Ph.D, 2009), Joseph Camilleri (Ph.D., 2008), Anna Ebel-Lam (Ph.D. 2009) Shelly Paik (Ph.D. 2010), Roy Spina (Ph.D., 2009), Erica Refling (M.Sc. 2010), and Kevin Rounding (M.Sc. 2010).  A number of our students have also been honoured for outstanding teaching, including Council of Canadian Departments of Psychology Certificates of Teaching to Lindsay Schaefer, Roy Spina, Kevin Rounding, and Leigh Turner.

Faculty Updates:

Dr. Lee Fabrigar continues his study of the psychology of attitudes and persuasion. Lee recently completed a co-authored book on exploratory factor analysis that will be published by Oxford University Press. He also recently returned from Singapore, where he was a Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore.

Dr.  Ron Holden’s research compares theoretical and empirical methods for detecting faking on psychological tests of personality. His other research areas focus on the use of drug combinations for the treatment of neuropathic and fibromyalgic pain, and seek to develop a pre-operative screening measure to identify children who will have adverse reactions at the induction of surgical anesthesia.  

Dr. Jill Jacobson’s Motivation and Social Cognition Laboratory primarily investigates the social consequences of two distinct but related individual differences: dysphoria (or subclinical depression) and causal uncertainty.

Dr. Li-Jun’s Ji’s Culture and Cognition lab continues to investigate how cultures shape the way people think and make decisions. Her lab had a reunion in the summer of 2010 in Melbourne, Australia and again in 2011 in Kunming, China. 

Dr. Rod Lindsay’s Legal Studies Lab continues to explore both biased and improved methods of eyewitness identification. Rod was awarded the 2010 Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision (Queen’s
University). 

Dr. Tara MacDonald’s lab group assesses the interactive effects of attachment anxiety and rejection on a number of outcome variables such as conflict, health behaviour, and body image.

Welcome New Grad Students

The department would like to extend a warm welcome to our new graduate students

Michael Best, CLIN

Meghan Collett, BBCS

Madeleine D’Agata, SOC

Laurel Dault, DEV

Justin Deonarine, BBCS

Rosaria (Sara) Furlano, DEV

Justin Gates, CLIN

Michael Grossman, CLIN

Layla Hall, CLIN

Adrijana Koljuskov, CLIN

Christine Lambert, CLIN

Erin Larson, SOC

Raegan Mazurka, CLIN

Susan Quartarone, BBCS

Ariel Silver, SOC

Andrew Smith, SOC

Amanda Timmers, CLIN

Seamas Weech, BBCS

Ning Zhang, SOC